The Quote Mine Project

Or, Lies, Damned Lies and Quote Mines

Assorted Quotes, Part 2

Quote #4.19

[Spontaneous generation of living organisms is impossible]

One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to
concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is
impossible. Yet here we are -- as a result, I believe, of
spontaneous generation. - George Wald, Harvard University
biochemist and Nobel Laureate, 1954

It should first be noted that, while Wald uses the term
"spontaneous generation" throughout the article, he is not really
concerned with the historic notion "that life arises regularly
from the nonliving: worms from mud, maggots from decaying meat,
mice from refuse of various kinds" that was shown to be untenable
by Francesco Redi, Lazzaro Spallanzani and Louis Pasteur.
Although he gives an account of Redi's, Spallanzani's and
Pasteur's work, his real concern is "how organisms may have
arisen spontaneously under different conditions [than exist in
the present] in some former period, granted that they do so no
longer." In short, he is speaking about what we would now call
"abiogenesis."

The source of the above quote is an article Wald wrote,
entitled "The Origin of Life," that appeared in the August 1954
issue of Scientific American (vol. 191), on pages
44-53. This is the same article that was ultimately the source of
Quote Mine #57.

As was the case with Quote Mine # 57, the creationists have
frequently mangled the citation in passing around the quote. The
"Journey" site above gives the source as "George Wald, 'The
Origin of Life,' Scientific American, 191:48, May
1954" as does The Triunity
Report: The Origin of Life and The Suppression of Truth.
Another site, Adventist
Review: The Simple Cell?, gives it as "Scientific
American, May 1954." The latter site goes on to merge this
quote mine with a variation on Quote Mine #57, which itself was a
paraphrase of what Wald said that bore little resemblance to his
actual point, thus creating a true paragon of misinformation.

Unlike Quote Mine #57, however, the actual words attributed
to Wald do appear in his article, on page 46. Immediately
following on the two sentences above is a third that, together,
form a complete paragraph that reads:

One has only to contemplate the magnitude of this task to
concede that the spontaneous generation of a living organism is
impossible. Yet here we are -- as a result, I believe, of
spontaneous generation. It will help to digress for a
moment to ask what one means by "impossible." [Emphasis
added.]

Wald then goes on to discuss probability, beginning with the
simple-to-calculate cases of coin tosses and dice, where the
possible number of outcomes are known. He continues:

When one has no means of estimating the probability
beforehand, it must be determined by counting the fraction of
successes in a large number of trials.

Our everyday concept of what is impossible, possible or
certain derives from our experience: the number of trials that
may be encompassed within the space of a human lifetime, or at
most within recorded human history. In this colloquial, practical
sense I concede the spontaneous origin of life to be
"impossible." It is impossible as we judge events in the scale of
human experience.

We shall see that this is not a very meaningful concession;
For one thing, the time with which our problem is concerned is
geological time, and the whole extent of human history is trivial
in the balance.

Wald then discusses the fact that highly improbable things can
happen but that, as a result of the skeptical attitude of persons
of good judgment, "events which are merely very extraordinary
acquire the reputation of never having occurred at all." But Wald
calls scientists the "[l]east skeptical" of all "judicious
persons" because "cautious as they are, [they] know very well
what strange things are possible." Wald's example for this, the
possibility that a table will spontaneously rise into the air if
"the molecules of which the table is composed, ordinarily in
random motion in all directions, should happen by chance to move
in the same direction," neatly anticipates Fred Hoyle's "Tornado
in a Junkyard" argument.
Therefore, according to Wald, "it does not mean much to say that
a very improbable event has never been observed."

More importantly, though:

When we consider the spontaneous origin of a living organism,
this is not an event that need happen again and again. It is
perhaps enough for it to happen once. The probability with which
we: are concerned is of a special kind; it is the probability
that an event occur at least once. To this type of probability a
fundamentally important thing happens as one increases the number
of trials. However improbable the event in a single trial, it
becomes increasingly probable as the trials are multiplied.
Eventually the event becomes virtually inevitable.

Wald gives the following example:

Consider a reasonably improbable event, the chance of which is
1/1,000. The chance that this will not occur in one trial is
999/1,000. The chance that it won't occur in 1,000 trials is
999/1,000 multiplied together 1,000 times. This fraction comes
out to be 37/100. The chance that it will happen at least once in
1,000 trials is therefore one minus this number -- 63/100 -- a
little better than three chances out of five. One thousand trials
have transformed this from a highly improbable to a highly
probable event. In 10,000 trials the chance that this event will
occur at least once comes out to be 19,999/20,000. It is now
almost inevitable.

Time is in fact the hero of the plot. The time with which we
have to deal is of the order of two billion years. What we regard
as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless
here. Given so much time, the "impossible" becomes possible, the
possible probable, and the probable virtually certain. One has
only to wait: time itself performs the miracles.

It is now clear why the quote miners omitted the sentence
following the snippet they appropriated. Including it might have
tipped off the people the quote is intended to impress that they
are being mislead. And if they went and actually looked at the
article, they would find that Wald was not saying that a
naturalistic origin of life is impossible but was, instead,
engaged in a bit of rhetorical flourish, leading up to his
conclusion that:

The important point is that since the origin of life belongs
in the category of at-least-once phenomena, time is on its side.
However improbable we regard this event, or any of the steps
which it involves, given enough time it will almost certainly
happen at least once. And for life as we know it, with its
capacity for growth and reproduction, once may be enough.

In short, Wald's conclusion in the article is diametrically
opposed to the spin the creationists want to put on it. Wald is
not, as the creationists would have you believe, arguing for a
naturalistic view[1]despite the "evidence" of the supposed great
improbability of life arising naturally, he is arguing that there
is no such "evidence." Wald's point is, first of all, that the
probability of abiogenesis happening is impossible to calculate.
But beyond that, the very nature of the problem suggests the
likelihood that abiogenesis did happen, here on Earth or
somewhere in the universe.

Creationists are free to dispute Wald's arguments or his
conclusions, of course. In fact, he accepts, based on the
evidence available in 1954, that there was some 2 billion years
between the point that conditions on Earth made life possible and
its first appearance.
Evidence discovered in the 50 years that have passed since
Wald's article suggests that liquid water first appeared on the
Earth about 4.4 billion years ago, while the earliest fossils
found are dated at 3.5 billion years ago and the earliest (though
disputed) signs of life date to 3.8 billion years ago. It is not
immediately obvious that 700 million years or so is insufficient
for Wald's argument to be valid.

Ultimately, the question of whether the arguments Wald
advanced were right is not the point here. The quote miners could
have set out Wald's arguments and tried to make a case against
them and no one could have complained. They chose, instead, to
misrepresent his arguments in an attempt to hijack Wald's
reputation. They succeeded only in ruining their own.

- John (catshark) Pieret

[1] There were a
number of letters about Wald's article published in the October
1954 issue of Scientific American. One of them makes a crude
attempt to argue that the term "trial" implies a conscious
"trier," which Wald, in a response to the letters, disposes of by
pointing out that he "meant only an event to whose outcome one
might attach a probability."

More interestingly, a professor R. L. Probst refers to
Human Destiny, a book by Lecomte du Noüy, that,
in turn, claims that calculations made by Professor
Charles-Eugène Guye about the formation of proteins showed
that:

. . . the time needed to form, on an average, one such
molecule in a material volume equal to that of our terrestrial
globe is about 10243 billion years. But we must not
forget that life appeared about one billion years ago.... We are
faced with an interval which is more than 10243 times
too short.

Probst sums up his point:

I will admit that the scientist should try to explain events
by natural causes, without bringing in the intervention of God,
as long as it is possible and reasonable to do so. But science
demands that a theory have some solid evidence supporting it.:
Therefore, to hold that life has developed spontaneously by
chance is not a scientific' statement; it is a sheer act of
faith, perhaps based on a prejudice against admitting the action
of an agent outside of the material universe.

Wald replies that he has "no strong personal prejudice against
invoking God's intervention in the origin of life." In fact, he
notes:

The Jesuit priest, John Turberville Needham, a great champion
of spontaneous generation, believed that God created matter
initially with the potentiality of spontaneously generating life.
Indeed, as pointed out in my article, this belief is consonant
with the relevant passages in the Book of Genesis [that God bade
the earth and waters to bring forth plants and animals]. If
Professor Probst is dissatisfied with this view, where does he
believe that God intervened? Was it to create the first protein?
Or the first living cell? Or a man?

As to the supposed calculations, Wald reiterates that:

. . . no adequate basis exists for such a calculation. We are
concerned here with the probabilities associated with a series of
stepwise reactions and aggregations, none of which perhaps
exceeds the bounds of what may happen in a two-body
collision.

I wonder how one might have assessed the probability that a
mixture of water vapor, methane, hydrogen and ammonia, passed for
a week over an electric spark, could form a variety of amino
acids in relatively high yield. Yet in 1953 Miller showed that
this happens, and our entire conception of its intrinsic
probability is revised accordingly.

By the way, Guye was a
physicist who died in 1942 and was calculating the odds of
atoms lining up by accident to form a protein if a vessel the
size of the Earth with the constituent atoms was mechanically
shaken at the speed of light. In other words, like Hoyle, he was
someone outside his area of expertise, calculating "odds" based
on utterly unrealistic premises that have nothing to do with
biochemistry as we know it, much less any realistic hypotheses
about abiogenesis.

Quote #4.20

[Evolution is not scientific]

Our theory of evolution ... cannot be refuted by any possible
observations. Every conceivable observation can be fitted into it.
It is thus 'outside of empirical science' but not necessarily false.
No one can think of ways to test it. Ideas either without basis or
based on a few laboratory experiments carried out in extremely
simplified systems have obtained currency far beyond their validity.
They have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most of
us as part of our training. - Paul Ehrlich and L. C. Birch

The full citation is: Birch, L. C. & Ehrlich, P. R., "Evolutionary
History and Population Biology", Nature 214, 349 - 352 (22 April 1967).
For those with subscriptions, the
original paper can be found at Nature's website.

If one reads only the creationists' quotation from Ehrlich and Birch's article, one would think
that Ehrlich and Birch believe that the theory of evolution as a whole is untestable.
That impression, however, would be far from the truth, since the creationists have, by
quoting Ehrlich and Birch out of context, distorted their views. This is the quotation in
Scientific Creationism:

Our theory of evolution has become . . . one which cannot be refuted
by any possible observations. It is thus "outside of empirical science," but
not necessarily false. No one can think of ways in which to test it. . . .
(Evolutionary ideas) have become part of an evolutionary dogma accepted by most
of us as part of our training. [pp. 6-7]

The creationists did not cite the very next sentence: "The cure seems to us
not to be a discarding of the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory,
but more skepticism about many of its tenets" (Ehrlich and Birch, p. 352). If
Ehrlich and Birch think that the theory of evolution as a whole is untestable,
why do they say, in the very next sentence, that evolutionary theory should not
be scrapped? The answer is that they do not regard the theory of evolution as
a whole to be untestable, as even a cursory reading of the article shows. At
the beginning of Ehrlich and Birch's article, offset and in boldface, is a
good precis:

While accepting evolutionary theory, should ecologists be more skeptical
about hypotheses derived solely from untestable assumptions about the
past? The authors put forward the view that many ecologists underestimate
the efficacy of natural selection and fail to distinguish between
phylogenetic and ecological questions. [p. 349]

These two biologists are not at all dissatisfied with the theory of
evolution as such.

They are dissatisfied, however, with how some scientists make use of
some
hypotheses about the evolutionary past. The article is about how some ecologists
investigate matters poorly by turning too readily to untestable assumptions about
the past to answer their questions rather than first turning to explanations that
are falsifiable. Ehrlich and Birch write, for example:

It is clear that considerably more thorough investigations of
the present day population biology of these birds, with the emphasis on the
genetics of clutch size, magnitude of selection pressure on clutch size, and
rates of gene flow, will be necessary before we fall back on an untestable
historical hypothesis. [p. 350]

In brief, those ecologists who investigate poorly have used untestable
historical hypotheses to circumvent the need for more empirical
investigation, which is objectionable. [This is not to imply that
historical hypotheses are automatically untestable; see the
next article, page nine.]

Ehrlich and Birch also say that the tendency of some ecologists to turn too
quickly to untestable historical hypotheses has been accompanied by a
failure to address logically prior questions and confusions about what
constitutes a proper scientific explanation (pp. 350-351).

What are these untestable historical hypotheses? They are very specific
assertions about specific animals in specific locations. One example is about
the ancestral habitat of the British great tit, Parus major. Another is
about competition in the past between two species of birds on the Canary
Islands, Fringella coelebs and Fringella coerulea (p. 350). The
point is that these hypotheses are about specific details of evolutionary
history. These hypotheses are quite peripheral. They are not fundamental
propositions in the theory of evolution. They are not even relatively
important to the theory as a whole but represent only some sloppy work
on the part of some ecologists. The untestability of these speculations
about very specific details, therefore, does not imply that fundamental
or relatively important propositions of evolutionary theory are untestable.
In fact, such propositions as "More complex lifeforms have developed out of
simpler ones" and "Dinosaurs existed and became extinct long before modern
humans came into existence" are testable. The evidence could disconfirm them,
but it simply does not. No doubt Ehrlich and Birch recognize this, which is
why they recommend that evolutionary theory be retained.

Furthermore, Ehrlich and Birch not only favor retaining evolutionary
theory but also criticize their colleagues for failing to appreciate
"the efficacy of natural selection." As I pointed out earlier,
creationists believe that explanations in terms of natural selection
are untestable. To say the least, it is not in their best interest to
cite as authoritative such strong advocates of the explanatory power
of natural selection.

- Peter Hutcheson

Quote #4.21

[Too little evidence in the fossil record to support human evolution]

Palaeoanthropologists seem to make up for a lack of fossils with
an excess of fury, and this must now be the only science in
which it is still possible to become famous just by having an
opinion. As one cynic says, in human palaeontology the
consensus depends on who shouts loudest. - J.S. Jones

The full citation is: J. S. Jones, "A thousand and one Eves" review of the book "The Search for Eve" by
Michael H. Brown. Harper & Row: 1990., Nature 345, 395-396 (31 May 1990).
For those with subscriptions, the
original review can be found at Nature's website.

Creationists generally use this quote to indicate that
acceptance of human evolution is a matter of faith among
researchers without objective scientific support.

However as the quote in fuller context makes clear Jones appears
to be making an unrelated point about journalists who are less
impressed by the science than by the irrelevant personalities of
the researchers:

It [The Search for Eve] is a racy tale about the human race and about the quarrels of
those who study it. As usual, the science is more interesting than the scientists. Does it really
matter that one proponent has "piercing gelid eyes" while another is a "demure earth mother"?
Admittedly, though, there are few fields which can boast papers written from prison where the author
is serving time for poisoning the judge who gave him a drugs sentence. Palaeoanthropologists seem to
make up for a lack of fossils with an excess of fury, and this must now be the only science in which
it is still possible to become famous just by having an opinion. As one cynic says, in human
palaeontology the consensus depends on who shouts loudest.

Still, Jones was aware that palaeontologists often bitterly disagree over details, since it
is difficult or impossible to know how close any particular homonid fossil "is on the direct line of
descent to modern humans." On the other hand, in the same review he says:

Fossils are, above all, evidence for the fact of evolution
rather than for how it happened. &
New fossil discoveries mean that man has been getting younger
every year, and there are now no major disagreements about the
date of the separation of the human and the ape family trees.

These and other statements by Jones, flatly contradict the
meaning suggested by creationist quote miners.